America: The Essential Learning Edition

A best-selling narrative history enters a new generation

The beloved and best-selling America: A Narrative History family of books has been used by millions of students because of its enthralling storytelling that brings history to life. Award-winning teachers and scholars Daina Ramey Berry (University of California, Santa Barbara), Joseph Crespino (Emory University), and Amy Murrell Taylor (University of Kentucky) join lead author David Shi (Furman University) to enhance the balanced narrative with a focus on the diverse experiences of women in American history. Seamlessly integrated into the reading experience, new tools help students to read at the college level and engage with the building blocks of history: primary sources.

David Emory Shi?is president emeritus and professor emeritus at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. After receiving his PhD from the University of Virginia, he taught for seventeen years at Davidson College, where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award and served as History Department Chair. In addition to authoring the best-selling America: A Narrative History family of books, he is the author of several books focusing on American cultural history, including the award-winning?The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture?and?Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920. While serving as a Trustee at several colleges, he remains highly engaged with students and instructors around the country with his many annual “author-in-residence” campus visits.

Daina Ramey Berry is Professor of History and Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She came to Santa Barbara in August 2022 after serving as the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at The University of Texas, Austin. She is an internationally recognized scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery and Black women’s history in the United States. Her most recent book,?A Black Women’s History of the United States, won the 2021 Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Book in Feminist Studies, was a 2021 NAACP Finalist for Literary Non-Fiction, and received honorable mention for the 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award sponsored by the Organization of American Historians.

Joseph Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University and chair of the History Department. He is an expert in the political and cultural history of the twentieth century United States. He has served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Tubingen, and his research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Academy of Education. Named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians, Crespino has written three books, the most recent of which is Atticus Finch: The Biography―Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and The Wall Street Journal. Crespino regularly teaches the post-Civil War U.S. History survey; in 2009, he received the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award from the Emory University Center for Teaching and Learning.

Amy Murrell Taylor is the T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. She is a social and cultural historian of the nineteenth-century United States, with a focus on the American South. The U.S. history survey course is one of her very favorite courses to teach each year, and she has been honored with her university’s Provost’s Award for Outstanding Teaching and Great Teacher Awards. Her latest book, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps, received multiple national awards including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize given by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance at Yale University and the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians. She has also written for The Times Literary Supplement and been featured in The Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, and C-Span.